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NASA ready to fly the Front Range as part of pollution test

Planes will pass over Longmont

By Scott Rochat

Times-Call staff writer

Posted:
07/06/2014 10:00:00 AM MDT

Updated:
07/07/2014 08:00:13 AM MDT

A P-3B aircraft will also be part of the month-long NASA Front Range air pollution study, taking samples from 15,000 feet and 1,000 feet. The NASA planes will pass over Longmont as part of their flight plan, which covers an area between Castle Rock and Fort Collins. (Courtesy of NASA Wallops Flight / Longmont Times-Call)

NASA wants to see where the Front Range is having a bad air day.

Starting July 16, the space agency will fly a pair of airplanes over the Front Range to distinguish between high-altitude air pollution and the sort found closer to the ground. The information will be used to improve how satellites monitor pollution.

The flights will continue through Aug. 20 and would pass over Longmont three times a day, according to NASA.

"What they're trying to do is paint a three-dimensional picture over that area," said Michael Finneran, news chief for the agency's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "That area contains a diverse mix of air pollution sources: transportation, power generation, oil and gas activity, agriculture, natural emissions from vegetation and some episodic wildfires. There's a lot of stuff going on there."

One of NASA's planes will be too high to draw much attention — a King Air B200 that will operate at about 27,000 feet — but the other, a NASA P-3B Orion could drop from 15,000 feet down to 1,100 feet as it spirals over sites on the ground.

The Orion won't be the only low flier, either. During the same period, the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research will fly a third plane, a C-130 Hercules, over the area for its own air pollution study — FRAPPE, the Front Range Air Pollution and Photochemistry Experiment — and could get as low as 1,000 feet above ground level, according to NCAR.

"Both of these aircraft are large and noisy and we can expect some calls from residents, not just about noise, but from a safety perspective as well," Barth wrote in an email.

FRAPPE will run through Aug. 16. The Hercules follows a different flight plan than NASA, Finneran said, and may range upwind and downwind of the Northern Front Range area to collect its samples.

The planes are too heavy to land at Vance Brand but will instead base out of Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, covering an area from Castle Rock to Fort Collins. Barth will work with traffic controllers in Denver to avoid interference with other flights over Longmont.

This is the fourth and final set of flights for the NASA project, called "DISCOVER-AQ." Earlier flights covered the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area in 2011, the San Joaquin Valley in California in January and February of 2013, and the Houston region last September.

Finneran said he was surprised at how few complaints the Maryland flights drew three years ago.

"We were really expecting a lot more reaction," he said. "We were flying in a high-service airspace, with millions of people below us, flying over major highways. But there wasn't really any reaction."

The planes will enter from the west side of town and head east as they go to and from Fort Collins. NASA expects to get in at least 10 flights and maybe as many as 14 over the month-long project, Finneran said, but flights could be canceled due to weather or mechanical problems.

Airplane noise issues have been controversial for Longmont in recent years. In 2013, a group called Citizens for Quiet Skies sued Mile Hi Skydiving — which is based out of Vance Brand — over what it called the planes' incessant "drone." The case is currently scheduled for trial next April.

A C-130 Hercules will also be taking air quality measurements along the Front Range for a study by the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The study and flight plan are separate from NASA's but will take place over the same time period. (Courtesy of NSF/NCAR / Longmont Times-Call)

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